Enkay Blog

Money Making Ebook & Female Blogger List!

Free Money Making Ebook by Caroline Middlebrook
I recently received an email from a lady by the name of Caroline Middlebrook. She informed me about a FREE ebook that she has written called “How to Develop Money-Making Niche Sites with WordPress“. I really liked the title of the book and I decided to check it out. I was so impressed by the way the book was put together, the information present within the book and how easy it was to understand that I felt she deserves a mention on the blog. She goes through the basics of installing Wordpress, a new theme, new plugins and even Google Adsense. I think the book is a great resource and its definitely worth a read!

Female Blogger List
My Female Blogger list is still active however because of the time it takes to update it, I had put it on hold for a while. Recently, it started receiving more attention and I decided to start updating it again but this time on a monthly basis. I just wanted to say that it is quite a task to do mainly because I do not have a system in place that acquires data from Technorati, Alexa and Google and so the information has to be manually inputted into a file that derives the rankings. The list will now be the Top 100 and that means 900 numbers have to be manually inputted so it can be time consuming, so I apologize ahead of time in case there is a delay. Hopefully you guys understand and I really appreciate the fact that you appreciate my effort! Thank you again!

How You Can Improve Traffic

Lately, I received a few questions regarding how you can improve traffic. As some of you know, I am trying to improve my traffic levels and I decided to talk about some of the ways I plan on doing that. Its not too difficult to get traffic but it is difficult to maintain that traffic so this is more about how well you can keep yourself in the game. Lets take a look at a few things I am doing:

1) Maintain Your Posting Frequency - It is true that I do dip low once in a while but for the most part I try to get 4-5 posts a week and sometimes a few more if I find something interesting but about 4-5 topic posts. If your post frequency is one post a week, then you may not be able to maintain your readers. You need to find a way to keep people coming back and the way to do is is by maintaining a standard.

2) Be Unique - If you and 10 other bloggers are talking about the same issues then there isn’t any reason why you should expect someone to read your blog and not the other blog. You need to find a way to stand out from the crowd and that can be done in the way you write your posts, diagrams, or anything of that sort.

3) Inspire Others - Sometimes you can have a post that is informational and sometimes that post inspires others. What usually happens is that someone likes a post on your blog and they link to it and that is one way to get traffic on a consistent basis. If you are making sure to give out great advice then you will see that your readers will respond more to it and not only return but they will also want others to know about it.

Some of the facts that DO NOT play a role in how your traffic is affected are listed below:

1) Contests - Yes, contests do bring you a lot of attention and might bring you a lot of traffic while the contest is running but sooner or later the buzz will die out so you need to have a plan to entice readers to stick around after the contest is over, and you can do that with the methods mentioned above.

2) Being Fake - This is a big issue nowadays and its mainly because you have a lot of people writing posts that are either not true or hosting unbelievable contests with no end result. Yeah, you might get a lot of attention for posting about something totally off the wall or having a contest where you give away a house, but when people will see the truth, then theres nothing worse than negative publicity. Be sure to maintain your image in the blogosphere and so lets be sure to do it with honesty.

So hopefully you have been able to gain something out of this post. If you like it, please Stumble it or Digg it and leave a comment. Let me get your feedback on some ways you improve your traffic.

Review: Is Life Really Colorful?

Abhijeet is the man behind the blog called “Life Is Colourful“. He has been the Top Commentator so many months that I have decided to give him the ad spot for as long as he is on top of that list. I subscribe to Abhijeet’s blog where he talks about everything from SEO, Affiliate Advertising and Google among several other things. As many of you may not know, the price of a Review through ReviewMe has now been raised to $100 to keep up with the other bloggers but you can still purchase a review for a discounted price directly through my blog. The price is $20 directly so thats about 80% off. Anyway, getting back to Life Is Colourful, you will notice that Abhijeet posts a few times a week and he was the one that informed me about how one can get reconsidered for being penalized on their Google Page Rank.

Design
Overall, I like the design on the blog but I do suggest that what is missing is some branding. Yes, the theme has been slightly customized but I would like to see what I call, a “differentiating factor” or something that sets this blog apart from others that use the same theme. This can probably be done with a customized header. The colors work well and the RSS Subcriber button is also placed in an appropriate place which is good.

There was an issue that I saw and even though I fall under the same category, I noticed that Abhijeet has a few too many ads on the website. I counted the ad blocks and came up with 6 total ad blocks and I am including a marked image to show that.

Another thing that I really missed was an About page. I can relate Abhijeet with LifeIsColourful.com but I was hoping I could get a little more information about the man behind the blog and things such as where he is from, what he does currently and things of that nature.

The thing that I really liked was the way he integrated MyAvatars into his comments. The image is displayed and then besides it is a dialogue box with the comment in it. I have had so many issues trying to get mine to work properly but that is probably the most likeable integration of MyAvatars in a blog.

Content
Abhijeet has been able to maintain a good frequency of posting and that has definitely helped his blog quite a bit and his posts itself are very well written and to the point. He doesn’t try to make it complex for his readers and that works to his advantage.

I also liked the fact that he has a Disclosure Policy in the navigation bar. Although, I have never felt the need for a disclosure policy, it can be useful to those who may object to some aspect of your blog content and by having a disclosure policy you can do away with all those people who have issues with regards to what you blog about.

One more suggestion that I would like to give Abhijeet is that, he might want to consider moving to the 3-column design of this theme and make the font of his content and sidebars a little bigger. I am used to reading small and large text but it can get to be a strain after a while for some people. I have kept mine at 11pt or 12pt font I believe but I think the theme itself has a stylesheet.css that sets the font at 10px which can be quite small. In comparison, the Google Adsense block on the left has a great font size and maybe making it a little bigger can help him.

So lets break it down to the Pros & Cons:

Pros:
- Great Theme Choice for the blog
- Location of RSS feed button is excellent
- Including Top Commentators is a good way to recognize your readers
- Nice Integration of MyAvatars in comments
- Good Frequency and Quality of Content

Cons:
- A few too many ad blocks
- Need an About Page to tell readers more about the author

Suggestions:
- Possible switch to 3-column design
- Increase the font size
- Cut down to 4 Adblocks from 6 AdBlocks
- Center Align the Feedburner Ticker and the RSS button below it

Hopefully those tips will help you out Abhijeet and I hope you like the review. I am sorry for the delay in getting this out faster! So go ahead and check out Life Is Colourful for a great read! Have a great rest of the weekend guys!

Enkay On Video!

Well, its finally coming around soon and you guys get to contribute to the video making process. I have decided that I will do short videos once a week or so. The videos won’t be too long and will probably range from 1 to 4 minutes long.

To start off I wanted to do a few questions from my readers. You can ask me any type of question that you want, as long as its not too obtrusive. I always try to reply to questions and requests in email but to have them done through video might be very interesting.

If you have a question that you would like to see me answer, then just leave me a comment with your question. I will answer all questions as long as they are appropriate. I will write a few questions for myself that I think might be interesting and I will try to record them during one video session this weekend. Let me know what you guys think of this idea.

Hopefully the videos will turn out good and that you guys will like them. So, if you have any question you would like answered, let me know!

Is Alexa Unfair? & Why Is Alexa Important?

I do not know about most of you but I have seen my Alexa ranking drop significantly over the past month and I am a little surprised by that mainly because traffic to the blog hasn’t gone down, actually it has increased! This trend has been seen not only in my blog but also some other blogs around the blogosphere.

It seems as though the New Year is bringing a big change to the way Alexa might be ranking its websites even though I am unsure about any algorithm changes. Now some of you may ask, why does Alexa even matter? Well, here are its advantages

1) Alexa is a major deciding factor if you are planning on signing up for ReviewMe or Sponsored Reviews or similar pay-to-blog websites mainly because your total ranking takes into account your Alexa rank.

2) Alexa is also a big deciding factor in your TLA sales. If you are using Text Link Ads, then Alexa is probably a big deciding factor in that too.

3) Alexa provides advertisers and other individuals who are interested in your blog, an idea about whether your blog/website is able to sustain its visitors or not

4) Alexa creates an even playing field for all types of websites so there is no bias of any kind.

Now that you have seen the advantages, lets recap on its disadvantages

1) It may not be too accurate because not everyone has the Alexa toolbar installed and so you may have lots of visitors but only a few with the toolbar installed and that can hurt your ranking.

2) Subdomains or sub-pages are not ranked and the ranking is based on the main domain only

3) Alexa can be influenced with certain tricks that you can read about all over the web and that leads to some “artificial” ranking

Anyway, hopefully this post has been insightful and I would like to know if any of you have seen your Alexa ranks decline lately.